This volume is based on the Field Museum of Natural History Spring System atics Symposium held in Chicago on May 11, 1991. The financial support of Ray and Jean Auel and of the Field Museum is gratefully acknowledged. When we teach or write, we present only those elements that support our arguments. We avoid all weak points of our debate and all the uncer tainties of our models. Thus, we offer hypotheses as facts. Multiauthored books like ours, which simultaneously advocate and question diverse views, avoid the pitfalls and lessen the impact of indoctrination. In this volume we analyze the anthropological and biological disagreements and the positions taken on the origins of modern humans, point out difficultieswith the inter pretations, and suggest that the concept of the human origin can be explained only when we first attempt to define Homo sapiens sapiens. One of the major controversies in physical anthropology concerns the geographic origin of anatomically modern humans. It is undisputed, due to the extensive research of the Leakeys and their colleagues, that the family Hominidae originated in Africa, but the geographic origin of Homo sapiens sapiens is less concretely accepted. Two schools of thought existon this topic."

The symposium "Prehistoric Iberia: genetics, anthropology and linguistics" was held in the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid on 16th -17th November 1998. The idea was bringing together specialists who could address not clearly resolved historic and prehistoric issues regarding ancient Iberian and Mediterranean populations, following a multidisciplinary approach. This was necessary in the light of the new bulk of genetic, archeological and linguistic data obtained with the new DNA technology and the recent discoverings in the other fields. Genes may now be easily studied in populations, particularly HLA genes and markers of the mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome. Basques, Iberians, North Africans, Berbers (Imazighen) and Mediterraneans have presently been widely studied. The genetic emerging picture is that Mediterraneans are closely related from West (Basque, Iberians, Berbers) to East (Jews, Lebanese, Cretans); however, Greeks are outliers in all the analyses done by using HLA genes. Anthropologists and archeologists showed how there was no people substitution during the revolutionary Mesolithic-Neolithic transition; in addition, cultural relationships were found between Iberia and predinastic Egypt (EI Badari culture). Basque language translation into Spanish has been the key for relating most Mediterranean extinct languages. The Usko-Mediterranean languages were once spoken in a wide African and European area, which also included parts of Asia. This was the "old language" that was slowly substituted by Eurasian languages starting approximately after the Bronze Age (or 2,000 years BC).

Collapsing concrete colossuses, run-down overgrown skeletons, immutable architectural misfits: the outcasts from our built environment, which we are dying to dispose of - and yet cannot do without - have inspired many ghost stories, crime novels and urban legends. Such narratives reveal the significance of architectural eyesores for the people who live or work in or near them. After exploring various approaches to building lives and deaths, the author presents a rich variety of undesired edifices in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Bosnia-Herzegovina and investigates the different methods used to dispose of them: eliminating, damaging, transforming or 'reframing' them, abandoning them to progressive dilapidation or virtually rejecting them. Discarding an edifice, however, need not bring its social life to an end. This analysis continues with a reflection on the afterlife of unwanted buildings, and concludes with a discussion on the life expectancy of buildings, their multi-sensory materiality and 'thingly' agency.

Through an examination of the critical junctures in postcolonial Sri Lankan politics, this book refines and advances our understanding of the dynamics underpinning violent and nonviolent "ethnic" conflict. It enables us to understand how the ebb and flow of relations within ethnic groups affects relations between groups, for good or for ill.

After putting down this weighty (in all senses of the word) collection, the reader, be she or he physician or social scientist, will (or at least should) feel uncomfortable about her or his taken-for-granted commonsense (therefore cultural) understanding of medicine. The editors and their collaborators show the medical leviathan, warts and all, for what it is: changing, pluralistic, problematic, powerful, provocative. What medicine proclaims itself to be - unified, scientific, biological and not social, non-judgmental - it is shown not to resemble very much. Those matters about which medicine keeps fairly silent, it turns out, come closer to being central to its clinical practice - managing errors and learning to conduct a shared moral dis course about mistakes, handling issues of competence and competition among biomedical practitioners, practicing in value-laden contexts on problems for which social science is a more relevant knowledge base than biological science, integrating folk and scientific models of illness in clinical communication, among a large number of highly pertinent ethnographic insights that illuminate medicine in the chapters that follow."

In the Americas, debates around issues of citizen's public safety-from debates that erupt after highly publicized events, such as the shootings of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, to those that recurrently dominate the airwaves in Latin America-are dominated by members of the middle and upper-middle classes. However, a cursory count of the victims of urban violence in the Americas reveals that the people suffering the most from violence live, and die, at the lowest of the socio-symbolic order, at the margins of urban societies. However, the inhabitants of the urban margins are hardly ever heard in discussions about public safety. They live in danger but the discourse about violence and risk belongs to, is manufactured and manipulated by, others-others who are prone to view violence at the urban margins as evidence of a cultural, or racial, defect, rather than question violence's relationship to economic and political marginalization. As a result, the experience of interpersonal violence among the urban poor becomes something unspeakable, and the everyday fear and trauma lived in relegated territories is constantly muted and denied. This edited volume seeks to counteract this pernicious tendency by putting under the ethnographic microscope-and making public-the way in which violence is lived and acted upon in the urban peripheries. It features cutting-edge ethnographic research on the role of violence in the lives of the urban poor in South, Central, and North America, and sheds light on the suffering that violence produces and perpetuates, as well as the individual and collective responses that violence generates, among those living at the urban margins of the Americas.

The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model-in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission-structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled "kinship." The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology's ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the "social" and "natural" sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.

Converging evidence from disciplines including sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and human biology forces us to adopt a new idea of what it means to be a human. As cherished concepts such as free will, naive realism, humans as creation's crowning glory fall and our moral roots in ape group dynamics become clearer, we have to take leave of many concepts that have been central to defining our humanness. What emerges is a new human, the homo novus, a human being without illusions. Leading authors from many different fields explore these issues by addressing a range of illusions and providing evidence for the need, despite considerable reluctance, to relinquish some of our most cherished ideas about ourselves.

The collective inquiries in this volume address ethnicity in ancient Africa as social fact and political artifact along numerous dimensions. Is ethnicity a useful analytic? What can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions which scholars have asked of identities in Africa? Eleven authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade. They examine how these intersect with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning from prehistory to the colonial period.

This book is a collection of the articles presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW 979859) held in St. Petersburg, from the 15-18 November 2003 in the Hermitage Museum. The title of the workshop was "The impact of the environment on Human Migration in Eurasia." More than 40 scientists from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Belgium, Finland, Lithuania and Latvia took part. The themes of the workshop focused on the origin, development, interactions, and migrations of prehistoric and ancient populations, specifically the Scythians, in Eurasia and their relationships with the environment of the time. The discussion of these questions necessitated the participation of specialists from a wide range of academic fields. Beyond any doubt, the environment played an important role in the life of ancient nomadic populations, forming the basis of their economies and influencing various aspects of their mode of life. In this respect, the collaboration of specialists in the Humanities and Science is essential for the solution of scientific questions concerning these peoples. Over the past few years, a large amount of new proxy data related to environmental changes during the Pleistocene and the Holocene and their impact on human life has become available. Our discussion was predominantly limited to environmental changes related to the Holocene. In st this period of about 10000 years, the main focus was on the 1 millennium BC.

The relations between behavior, evolution, and culture have been a subject of vigorous debate since the publication of Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). The latest volume of Perspectives in Ethology brings anthropologists, ethologists, psychologists, and evolutionary theorists together to reexamine this important relation. With two exceptions (the essays by Brown and Eldredge), all of the present essays were originally presented at the Fifth Biannual Symposium on the Science of Behavior held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in February 1998. The volume opens with the problem of the origins of culture, tackled from two different viewpoints by Richerson and Boyd, and Lancaster, Kaplan, Hill, and Hurtado, respectively. Richerson and Boyd analyze the possible relations between climatic change in the Pleistocene and the evo lution of social learning, evaluating the boundary conditions under which social learning could increase fitness and contribute to culture. Lancaster, Kaplan, Hill, and Hurtado examine how a shift in the diet of the genus Homo toward difficult-to-acquire food could have determined (or coe volved with) unique features of the human life cycle. These two essays illus trate how techniques that range from computer modeling to comparative behavioral analysis, and that make use of a wide range of data, can be used for drawing inferences about past selection pressures. As culture evolves, it must somehow find its place within (and also affect) a complex hierarchy of behavioral and biological factors."

Applied Anthropology: An Introduction (3rd edition) is a text focused on the use of the methods and theories of anthropology to solve the practical problems of human communities. It addresses a wide range of problem-solving practices in two large categories: development and research. The development-focused chapters include action research/participatory action research, cultural action, collaborative research, cultural brokerage, and social marketing. The research-focused chapters include social impact assessment, evaluation, and cultural resource management. Each chapter includes a defining statement about the approach considered and discussion of key concepts, a discussion of the basic process, and one or more case studies. These materials are supplemented with chapters on many domains of application and roles which applied anthropologists activate. These are coupled with chapters on the history of the development of applied anthropology, ethics, anthropology in development, and policy. The book concludes with a chapter on work-related issues such as employment and funding opportunities.

This cognitive ethnography examines how scientists create meaning about biological phenomena through experimental practices in the laboratory, offering a frontline perspective on how new insights come to life. An exercise in the anthropology of knowledge, this story follows a community of biologists in Western Norway in their quest to build a novel experimental system for research on Lepeoptheirus salmonis, a parasite that has become a major pest in salmon aquaculture. The book offers a window on the making of this material culture of science, and how biological phenomena and their representations are skillfully transformed and made meaningful within a rich cognitive ecology. Conventional accounts of experiments see their purpose as mainly auxiliary, as handmaidens to theory. By looking closely at experimental activities and their materiality, this book shows how experimentation contributes to knowledge production through a broader set of epistemic actions.In drawing on a combination of approaches from anthropology and cognitive science, it offers a unique contribution to the fields of cultural psychology, psychological anthropology, science and technology studies and the philosophy of science.

This book illuminates the importance of threat on the representation of everyday life, from an interdisciplinary perspective. Divided into three parts, the book sets out by addressing the conceptual aspects of threat and by opening views on phenomena and social processes associated with threat. It shows how threat constitutes an analytical category that simultaneously involves social, psychological, religious, historical and political factors, and calls for a sufficiently broad conceptual definition to integrate pluri-disciplinary contributions. The second part focuses on the building of threats, mainly the environmental threats that have reached a tragic dimension today and are a core aspect of world concerns, the contemporary global terrorism, the migrations and the challenges these bring to contemporary societies, as well as the threats associated with the emergence of nationalism and the diverse aspects of excluding the Other. The final part examines the coping strategies, including oblivion, denial and defiance associated with different sources of threats, for instance those arising from epidemic and collective diseases, financial technology, natural disasters and collective traumas.

Anthropology is a disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life. Generations of theorists, however, have expunged life from their accounts, treating it as the mere output of patterns, codes, structures or systems variously defined as genetic or cultural, natural or social. Building on his classic work The Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold sets out to restore life to where it should belong, at the heart of anthropological concern. Being Alive ranges over such themes as the vitality of materials; what it means to make things; the perception and formation of the ground; the mingling of earth and sky in the weather-world; the experiences of light, sound and feeling; the role of storytelling in the integration of knowledge; and the potential of drawing to unite observation and description.Our humanity, Ingold argues, does not come ready-made but is continually fashioned in our movements along ways of life. Starting from the idea of life as a process of wayfaring, Ingold presents a radically new understanding of movement, knowledge and description as dimensions not just of being in the world, but of being alive to what is going on there. This edition includes a new preface by the author.

"The book is well organized and the study follows smoothly from one chapter to the next offering a well-informed analysis of the nature-culture dichotomy on the Eastern Black Sea coast...This book's inter-disciplinary approach should make it appealing to an array of audiences from fisheries scientists and managers to environmental historians and cultural geographers." . H-Environment

..". in this] well written book Knudsen delivers an intriguing study about the meaning of the fish, the fishing activity as a way of life, and the culture of the fishermen. His ability to explain the culture and the life and hard work of Turkish fishers is outstanding." . Environmental History

Through the ethnography and history of fish production, seafood consumption, state modernizing policies and marine science, this book analyzes the role of local knowledge in the management of marine resources on the Eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey. Fishing, science and other ways of knowing and relating to fish and the sea are analyzed as particular ways of life conditioned by history, ideology and daily practice. The approach adopted here allows for a broader analysis of the role knowledge plays in the management of common pool resources (CPR) than is provided in much of the contemporary CPR debate that tends to have a somewhat narrow focus on institutions and rules. By contrast, the author argues that also local knowledge and the larger historical and ideological context of production, as manifest in state modernization policies and consumption patterns, should be taken into account when trying to explain the current management regime in Turkish Black Sea fisheries.

Stale Knudsen is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. He has spent extended periods doing fieldwork among Turkish Black Sea fishers. He is currently leading a working group on the Black Sea as part of an EU-funded project entitled "Knowledge-based Sustainable Management for Europe's Seas.""

First published in 1981, this title takes a 'sociobiological' approach to the exploration of sexual habits, looking at the fundamental biological nature of humans. The book covers the spectrum of human sexuality, considering love and marriage, variant sexuality and social influences. This is a valuable reissue for any student of sexual psychology or cultural and evolutionary anthropology with an interest in the fundamental influences on human sexuality.

First published in 1987, this book presents contributions from international authorities reviewing major themes in variant sexuality. Genetic and evolutionary arguments are presented for the preponderance of paraphilia in males, whilst Freudian and psychoanalytic theories are shown to have limited scientific basis. These and other topics are reviewed in an interesting book, which will be of particular value to students of the psychology of sexuality, evolutionary biology and psychiatry, as well as those with a more general interest in the social, behavioural and biological aspects of sexuality.

Culture and Consensus, first published in 1995 and a revised edition in 1997, explores the history of the relationship between politics and the arts in Britain since 1940, and shows how the search for a secure sense of English identity has been reflected in official and unofficial attitudes to the arts, architecture, landscape and other emblems of national significance. Illustrating his argument with a series of detailed case histories, Robert Hewison analyses how Britain's cultural life has reached its present enfeebled condition and suggests a way forward. This book will be of interest to students of art and cultural studies.

Ethnobiology and ethnoecology have become very popular in recent years. Particularly in the last 20 years, many manuals of methods have published the most classical approaches to the subject. There have been, however, many advances in research as a result of interaction with different disciplines, but also due to more recent results, new original and interesting questions. This handbook provides the current state of the art methods and techniques in ethnobiology and ethnoecology, and related fields. This new volume, besides bringing new and original aspects of what is found in the literature, fills some of the gaps in volume one by including the most systematic and extensive treatment of methods and techniques in qualitative research. Along with the various methods covered in the individual chapters, the handbook also includes an extensive bibliography that details the current literature in the field.

This book investigates the relationship of secrecy as a social practice to contemporary media, news cultures and public relations. Drawing on Georg Simmel's theorisation of how secrecy produces a 'second world' alongside the 'obvious world' and creates and reshapes social relations, Anne Cronin argues for close analysis of the PR industry as a powerful vector of secrecy and an examination of its relationship to news cultures. Using case studies and in-depth interviews, as well as recent research in media and cultural studies, sociology, journalism studies and communication studies, the book analyses how PR practices generate a second, shadow world of the media sphere which has a profound impact on the 'obvious world'. It interrogates both the PR industry's and news culture's role in shaping social relations for a digital media landscape, and those initiatives promoting transparency of data and decision-making processes. An insightful, interdisciplinary approach to debates on media and power, this book will appeal to students of public relations, sociology, media studies, cultural studies and communication studies. It will also be of interest to scholars and practitioners working at the intersections of media, social relations and public trust.

"Postill's book will provide a stimulating read to anyone interested in the broad field of nationalism studies.a breakthrough attempt to bring nation building back on the agenda of media and communication research, and a valuable contribution to the field of media anthropology. Further comparative work in this area will hopefully give rise to a revised theory of nation building, one that acknowledges and theorizes the diversity of nation building processes, and the associated diversity of modernization projects, around the world." . H-Nation ..". very well written, lively, incisive and clear. Students will learn a lot about anthropology and media from this book... it should be recommended or essential reading for students." . Andrew Beatty, Brunel University "The book excellently traces the development of both print and electronic media, which are central in making the Iban Malaysian. It] contributes much to our understanding of the complex process of change that has occurred among the Ibans." . Asian Anthropology With the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of civil wars and "regime changes," the question of nation building has acquired great practical and theoretical urgency. From Eastern Europe to East Timor, Afghanistan and recently Iraq, the United States and its allies have often been accused of shirking their nation-building responsibilities as their attention - and that of the media -- turned to yet another regional crisis. While much has been written about the growing influence of television and the Internet on modern warfare, little is known about the relationship between media and nation building. This book explores, for the first time, this relationship by means of a paradigmatic case of successful nation building: Malaysia. Based on extended fieldwork and historical research, the author follows the diffusion, adoption, and social uses of media among the Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo and demonstrates the wide-ranging process of nation building that has accompanied the Iban adoption of radio, clocks, print media, and television. In less than four decades, Iban longhouses ('villages under one roof') have become media organizations shaped by the official ideology of Malaysia, a country hastily formed in 1963 by conjoining four disparate territories. John Postill is a Research Fellow at the University of Bremen. He is currently studying e-government and ethnicity in Malaysia. Trained as an anthropologist at University College London, he has published a range of articles on the anthropology of media, with special reference to Malaysian Borneo.

an excellent collection that should be read by all scholars of Southeast Asia, and that should provoke more thought and research on the people whose lives and practicescontinue to connect Southeast Asian nation-states. . JRAI The literature on borders and borderlands, the state, globalization and ethnic minorities, is now huge, but the editors of this book do a good job of summarizing most of it in their introduction...This book will swiftly become a key reading in university courses dealing with borderlands and Southeast Asia. . Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde each of the studies is well worth making available and the set of them offers a useful addition to the literature on borders and migration. . Anthropos In a completely new approach to borders and border crossing, this volume suggests a re-conceptualization of the nation in Southeast Asia. Choosing an actor approach, the individual chapters in this volume capture the narratives of minorities, migrants and refugees who inhabit and cross borders as part of their everyday life. They show that people are not only constrained by borders; the crossing of borders also opens up new options of agency. Making active use of these, border-crossing actors construct their own live projects on the border in multiple ways against the original intention of the nation-state. Based on their intimate knowledge of the interaction of communities, anthropologists from Europe, the USA, Japan and Southeast Asia provide a vivid picture of the effects of state policies at the borders on these communities. Alexander Horstmann teaches Social Anthropology of Southeast Asia at the University of Munster and is a Fellow of the Study Group Islamic Culture Modern Society at the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut), Essen. Among his major publications include Class Culture and Space: The Construction and Shaping of Communal Space in South Thailand, Transaction, 2002. Reed L. Wadley is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Missouri, USA. His research includes borderlands, warfare, colonialism, natural resource management and historical ecology, involving Iban communities of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Among his publications are Punitive expeditions and divine revenge: Oral and colonial histories of rebellion and pacification in western Borneo, 1886-1902, Ethnohistory (2004)."